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Who started it?: “We expect applicants to take the most demanding schedule available to them?” That is the source of the one of the most cruel, and truly unnecessary, abuses of our children . These words send students, so many students, into depression and despair and hopelessness. The words are meant for those elite students who can do it all. The words have the greatest effect though, a truly pernicious one, on those who aspire to stay in the ball park for a ball that is likely to forever be out of reach.

The biggest shame, and it should be embarrassment, is that so many colleges say this when meeting with students and it’s simply not true. When I hear it, my ears perk up: “NO YOU DON”T ,” I say to myself. “I see who you admit and this is simply not true”.

There was an article on a comment I wrote “A Plea for Change in College Admissions” in Inside Higher Edand below is a comment on it:

I am struck by, stay with me here, how this abuse of students is, like in the #me too movement, perpetuated by the nature of the unequal power position. Except most of this discussion is not about adults, it is about children. There was an opinion piece today in the NY Times, ‘Aziz Ansari is Guilty. Of not Being a Mind Reader‘ with the author stating that the woman who accused him had agency to be explicit about her concerns or to leave. And I thought about how these students are acting and reading some of the comments implying that there are many fish in the sea and students don’t have to play this game. But, by their very nature, children do not have agency. This competitive cycle begins early in high school or even in middle school for many. We adults need to protect our children and we are not. We as parents, as schools, as media are sometimes tacitly or at other times actively pushing our kids to their limits with the premise that it potentially improves their future. Number one, that’s all a lie. How many adults do you know that are where they are due to contacts they made in college? How important is it for experienced professionals what undergraduate college they went to when seeking employment? And how much of a setback is it that a kid only went to Cornell rather than U Penn or Vassar rather than Tufts or Drew instead of Muhlenberg?

The trade-off is sickening. The tax bill, if you can call it that is one of the biggest scams to ever be pulled on the disadvantaged in our society. The lowest income earners may get a small decrease in taxes this year, and possibly for the next few years. But, in return, everything around them that makes their lives better will be changing for the worse. There will be less money to pay for your child’s college, or their teachers, or to fix up their homes and their schools and their roads and their parks. There will be fewer police officers protecting their communities. Their health insurance rates will sky-rocket. Those with physical and developmental disabilities will have their lives become harder. And next they’ll be going after every one of society’s safety nets, from providing formula for infants, to caring for the elderly who are sick to giving the elderly protection from hunger and homelessness. Yes, that bus that brings the disabled to a meaningful job will not be running anymore. Something needs to give to get those wealthy people their tax breaks. And they may pull it off. Haven’t they screwed the poor enough? Do they really need to squeeze more blood out of them? That is a rhetorical question for this is what you get when you elect leaders who care more about campaign contributions than to protect and serve the people who chose them.

It is really a great service to kids for colleges to allow them to self-report scores. Kudo’s for a simple solution to solve a number of issues. For one, there is all this angst with score choice and the idiotic policy of only being allowed to send one sitting. What, it’s too complicated for an organization making hundreds of millions of dollars to write a simple algorithm to report the highest subtests from any of the tests, ie, to superscore? Also, I can see the fee being in place from the days they had to mail out scores. There were actual physical costs: paper envelopes, stamps, even possibly some human labor. But as everything became electronic and their costs went down, did they reduce the fee? No, they actually have increased it!

So I so this list of the 500 colleges with the highest yield rates (above 23%) at Lendedu

Well, I did a bit of data manipulations and came up with a list of where I divided the yield rate by the accept rate, getting a figure I called the DGS factor (Don’t Give a S**T)..

In particular, it is a list of colleges by how much they care whether you really want to go there.

I’ll use a personal example. My two older kids were very strong college applicants- straight A’s, strong scores, mostly AP’s. Son a National Merit Scholar, Daughter a National AP Scholar.

Son went to visit number 14 on the list and went to sign in. He asked where he should sign in and they said they don’t have such a list!

Daughter applied to number 200 as a safety school (she was admitted to places like Middlebury and Swarthmore). She got stuck in traffic so visited the college after admissions was closed. She was waitlisted.

So when students ask you whether it is important for them to let the colleges know how much they want to go there, check out the DGS index. If colleges are not on the list, I suspect that they have yield rates under 23%.

When I became Director, I was a bit surprised by the lack of consistency on these two really basic parts of our job. I worked at a school where I commented in a written observation that the counselor did not discuss with a low-income family how the student would pay for an expensive college that severely gapped the student. She told me that the former director did not allow them to discuss personal finance issues. It seems more common than not to only discuss financial aid terms, policies and forms rather than individual financial circumstances.

My Sister-in-Law directed a play called “The Pain in the Itch” by Bruce Norris. In it, the main character, an upper middle class American, Clay, describes to an African cab driver, Mr Hadid, how he wants to give his daughter “every advantage”. Mr. Hadid notes that an advantage for one necessitates a disadvantage to another. Clay vehemently denies this motivation, but Mr. Hadid stands by his words. Clay, it seems, is the literary embodiment of the helicopter parent, who through blindness of amoral familism, cannot see the implications of his behavior.

The term “helicopter parent” was coined in 1990 by Jim Fay, parenting and educational consultant, and Foster W. Cline, MD, a psychiatrist, in the book Parenting with Love and Logic: Teaching Children Responsibility.. It referred to a parent who hovers over a child in a way that runs counter to the parent’s responsibility to raise a child to independence.